A wide variety of mobile computing devices such as cellular telephones, pagers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and others are commonly in use. Such devices may be connected with a wireless network such as a cellular network through which the mobile devices may connect with other computing devices and other mobile devices. For example, one mobile device may send a voice or text message over a wireless network to another wireless device.
Additionally, fixed networks such as the Internet and other types of Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Local Area Networks (LANs) continue to develop. Attempts have been made to bridge wireless networks to fixed networks in limited ways. For example, some wireless devices include browser software for surfing or browsing the Internet. Additionally, email and text messages may be sent from fixed networks to various wireless devices.
In some cases, a message, such as an email or other text message, may be sent to a mobile device in the form of a Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) file using the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). For example, a user of a mobile device or other computing device may send an email to a user of a mobile device in the form of HTML text via a server with which the mobile device is connected. The server may then forward the message to the mobile device.
In other cases, an application may send information to a mobile device by sending an email to the mobile device using normal email protocols. For example, a user of an application on a mobile device or other computing device, while executing an application, may initiate the sending of an email including some content information. The email is generated by the application or another email program and is then sent to a server connected with the initiating device using standard email protocols. The mail server then forwards the email message to the intended recipient.
However, both of these approaches present some problems and limitations. First of all, transferring HTML messages to mobile devices is not widely supported, either by mobile devices or by application programs which may originate such messages. For example, a personal organizer program such as Microsoft Outlook® may not support the generation of HTML text to transfer a calendar appointment or task reminder to a mobile device. Additionally, an HTML file for transferring such information is highly platform or application specific. Therefore, this method presents compatibility problems between various systems and applications. Further, various security features, such as corporate firewalls, proxy servers, etc., limit the types of messages that may be transferred out of or through a given fixed network. Therefore, the sending of an HTML or email message to an unknown or unrecognized device will be blocked. This limits or complicates the use of these methods with some fixed networks. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.